THE Friday Boys are a disparate group of men spread across Tyneside who meet once a week - 'always on a Friday' - to talk about the arts, raise a glass to recently departed heroes and villains and, at the evening's end, down a whisky or two. The FBs have only one golden rule - talk of the working week is strictly off-limit.

Wednesday, 22 August 2012

Bob Dylan's Tempest - Review

Bob Dylan's fantastic new album
opens with a train song. Given the wrath to come and the often elemental ire
that accompanies it, not to mention all the bloodshed, madness, death, chaos
and assorted disasters that will shortly be forthcoming, you may be surprised
that what's clattering along the tracks here isn't the ominous engine of a slow
train coming, a locomotive of doom and destruction, souls wailing in a caboose
crowded with the forlorn damned and other people like them.

'Duquesne Whistle' instead, and at odds it will shortly transpire with much we
go on to encounter, joyfully evokes the jubilee train of gospel legend, bound
for glory; a salvation express full of hopeful halelujahs, its destination
somewhere better than here, this sickly place and its trampled sadness,
unceasing strife and grief everywhere you look. In ways some distance removed
from the things waiting on the rest of the album, Duquesne Whistle is passably carefree, possibly even best described as
rambunctious.

It begins fabulously, with a jazzy instrumental preface, reminiscent of 'Nashville
Skyline Rag', guitarists Charlie Sexton and Stu Kimball briskly exchanging
Charlie Christian licks. It's like turning on the radio and tuning into the
past, nostalgically evocative of a more sunlit innocent time. There is too the
impression that we have joined the album, somehow, after it's already started
and eerily like this music has been playing on a disk that never stops
spinning. Then the whole group blows in, the magnificent road band that's
backed Dylan, most of them anyway, on everything he's recorded since 'Love and
Theft', and so includes Modern Times, Together Through Life and Christmas in
the Heart.

They are ablaze here and on fire throughout, and at their jitterbugging point
of entry. 'Duquesne Whistle' takes on an unstoppable momentum that may remind
you of, say, 'Highway 61 Revisited' or 'Tombstone Blues' (I was also fleetingly
reminded of Cat Power's swinging version of 'Stuck inside of Mobile'
from the I'm not Here soundtrack. Even as the song is apparently celebrating
what's good in the world, something more awry is stirring, clouds gathering.
'Can't you hear that Duquesne Whistle blowin? Blowin like the sky's gonna blow
apart' Dylan sings in intimation of shadows about to fall on paradise. In other
words, Tempest is not dark yet, but it will be soon enough.

When Dylan convened with his band at Jackson Browne's Groove Masters Studio on
Santa Monica, he's said it was his intention to make a 'religious ' album,
though he wasn't specific about quite what he meant by this and whether there
was any connection between the record he had in mind and his so-called Born
Again albums, that trio of disks including Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of
Love that 30 years ago shocked and confounded his audience, when they were also
alarmed by the vengeful sermonising that punctuated his concerts of the time. There are perhaps
inklings, though, of the album Dylan originally envisioned on, for instance,
the devotionally inclined 'Long and Wasted Years', and the gospel influenced
'Pay in Blood', which follows. The testing of belief in extreme circumstances
is a recurring theme.

Long and Wasted Years finds Dylan almost talking his way through the song, in
the manner of 'Three Angels' from New Morning, over a slightly churchy organ
and a lovely bluesy guitar refrain. 'I think that when my back was turned, the
whole world behind me burned', Dylan recites at one point, the charred
landscape that so much of Tempest occupies coming into full focus, a forlorn
sort of place, populated by the displaced and the lost, to who Dylan gives
poignant voice. 'I ain't seen my family in 20 years', he reflects wearily in
one of the verses 'They may be dead by now. I lost track of them after they
lost their land'. The bereft hopelessness that is evident in many instances on
the album is particularly well articulated here, especially in the song's
chastening final image: 'We cried on a cold and frosty morn.' Dylan mourns, and
there's no other word for it. 'We cried because our souls were torn/So much for
tears, so much for these long and wasted years'.

Pay in Blood opens with guitars, piano and a little Tex-Mex swagger over a
vaguely menacing chord sequence reminiscent of those great declamatory Warren
Zevon songs that Dylan so admires, like 'Lawyers, Guns and Money', 'Boom Boom
Mancini' (which Dylan covered in concert several times as a tribute when Zevon
died in 2003). There's a hint, too, in the arrangement, of the song's gospel
roots, and something of the Stones in Sexton's admirable guitar riff. It's a
song in part about the futile notion of suffering being in any way ennobling.
'How I made it back home, nobody knows/Or how I survived so many blows/I've
been through hell, what good did it do?' Dylan asks, a bitter question, asked
perhaps of God, since he then adds 'You bastard, I'm supposed to respect you? I'll
give you justice'. The singer's anger is anger palpably rising, and he is prone
to reject communal solace for a life apart, lonely and slightly terrified.
'This is how I spend my days/I take my fear and sleep alone' Dylan sings,
following it with the chilling pay-off line, several times repeated 'I pay in
blood, but not my own'.

‘Soon After Midnight', meanwhile, sounds at first like a touching, funny country
love song, gently crooned, with the languid melody lope of Mississippi.
It gives way suddenly, however, to a similar distress-'My heart is fearful/It's
never cheerful/I've been down on the killing floor'-and an incrementally
vengeful mood that surfaces several times elsewhere, with even greater
malevolence. 'Narrow Way',
for instance, is seven minutes of wrath, driven by the kind of scalding guitar circulations
that propelled 'Dirt Road Blues' on Time Out Of Mind and Modern Times' 'Rollin
and Tumblin', both of which also were indebted to Muddy Waters. 'This is a hard
country to stay alive in' Dylan sings, in condemnation of the people who have
made it thus, adding in warning 'I'm armed to the hilt'.

'Early Roman Kings' is equally livid, an accusatory tirade, again directed at
the same people Dylan has pretty much railed against since he first put
plectrum to guitar string and started having his say about things. The 'kings'
of the song are vividly seen in 'their sharkskin suits, bow-ties and buttons
and high top boots' as shyster bankers, corrupt money men who have bankrupted nations, impoverished millions. As Dylan
put it, 'The meddlers and peddlers, they buy and they sell/They destroyed your
city, they'll destroy you as well'. What Dylan feels about them is akin to the
savage hate expressed on 'Masters of War', say 'I could strip you of life,
strip you of breath/Ship you down to the house of death' he sings with hostile
contempt, nothing particularly equivocal about his point this point of view, which is in a word merciless.

'Early Roman Kings' is the closest thing here to the kind of
roadhouse blues that has been a signature of a lot of recent Dylan, especially Together
Through Life. David Hidalgo from Los Lobos adds typically gutsy accordion to
the band's robust vamping and the track's lurching gait is an absolute gas, its
vicious sentiment notwithstanding. The blues continues to be a vital part of
Dylan's music, but Tempest on key songs also marks a return to a folk tradition that has latterly not been as much in
evidence.

‘Scarlet Town' is notably set to a melody that sounds like
it's been passed down the ages and has a courtly mien reminiscent of the
Gillian Welch song from last year's The Harrow & The Harvest with which it
shares a title. Fiddle and banjo take the lead here, creating a mysterious
swirling atmosphere. There are flashes of bawdy humour, too, but the pervasive
mood, here as elsewhere, is ultimately of turmoil and unrest. Towards the end
of its 7 minute running time, the track is further interrupted by a wraith-like
guitar solo that rises out of the mix like something emerging from a fog and
adds a particular creepiness to things.

'Tim Angel' sounds similarly as if it could have been lifted wholesale from an anthology
of traditional folk songs, where hundreds of such tales must lurk. It's a
revenge ballad, nine minutes long, with no chorus, banjo and fiddle again to
the fore. The setting is vague. References in one of the latter verses to a
helmet and a cross-handed sword suggest a chivalric age. But soon after that,
there's a gunfight, the kind of point-black shootout set-piece you used to find
in Walter Hill movies, which suggests Dylan at one point may have had a Western
setting in mind, perhaps inspired by a recent tour bus viewing of something
like 'Duel in the Sun', a torrid oater starring Dylan favourite Gregory Peck. What
happens, anyway, is that someone called 'The Boss', which is not a name you
probably come across too often in the Child Ballads, one day comes home from
wherever to find his wife has gone missing. Whither the Missus? Has she simply left him, or been abducted? Boss upon investigation is
tipped off by a faithful retainer that the errant spouse has in fact made off
with one Henry Lee, leader of an unidentified clan. Boss orders his men to
horse and off they gallop in hot pursuit, his men deserting him along the way. Dogged Boss continues alone.
After presumably much travail, Boss tracks down Henry Lee and his wife, bursts
in on their amorous coupling and after declaring his love for his wife starts
blasting away. Henry Lee's the better shot and soon Boss is dying in his own
blood. The missus takes this surprisingly badly and stabs Henry Lee before
plunging a dagger into her own heart. The final image of the three of them
tossed into a single grave 'forever to sleep' is chillingly unforgettable.

And so to the title track: 45 verses over 14 minutes about the sinking of the
Titanic, inspired by Dylan's musing on the Carter Family's 'The Titanic', but
at times as much in debt to James Cameron's blockbuster movie (whose leading
man, Leonardo DiCaprio, is name-checked twice). The piece starts with what
sounds like a string quartet, after which brief overture the song settles into
a long unwinding waltz, progressing with stately resolution, verse following
verse, like a latter-day 'Desolation Row'. The song vividly describes the panic and confusion as the great ship
flounders, a metaphor for the folly of over-reaching ambition; mankind again
brought low by God's intervention. The scale of the disaster is enormous,
contains 'every kind of sorrow'. Dylan dramatically capturing the dark panic of
the moment-the blown hatches, the water pouring everywhere, the ship's smokestack crashing down, humbler
passengers trapped below decks-and as in the film, certain characters are given
their own scenes, each verse then a gripping vignette. There's for instance
someone called Wellington, holed up
in his cabin. 'Glass and shattered crystal lay shattered round about/He strapped
on both his pistols/how long could he hold out?' And here's Jim Backer: 'He saw the starlight shining/Streaming from the east/Death was on the
rampage/but his heart was now at peace.' 'Davy the brothel-keeper' meanwhile
'came out, dismissed his girls/Saw the water getting deeper/saw the changing of
his world.' The ship's captain at the moment of its sinking catches his reflection
in the glass of a compass and 'in the dark illumination, he remembered bygone
years/He read the book of Revelation/filled his cage with tears'.

After such calamity, the sheer tenderness of the closing
'Roll On, John' is as much of a shock as a mere surprise. A belated tribute to
John Lennon, the song is as direct and heartfelt as anything Dylan's written probably
since 'Sara', whose occasional gaucheness it recalls, as Dylan roams over
Lennon's career 'from the Liverpool docks to the red-light Hamburg streets',
quoting from Lennon and Beatles songs along the way, including 'A Day In The
Life', 'The Ballad Of John and Yoko' and 'Come Together'. The affection expressed for Lennon in the song is tangible, makes it
glow like a force-field, and by the end is totally disarming. 'Your bones are
weary, you're about to breathe your last' Dylan sings to his dead friend 'Lord
you know how hard that bit can be' before moving on to a spine tingling elegaic
chorus: 'Shine a light, Move it on, You burned so bright/Roll on, John'.

We must address, I suppose, in closing, the similarity of this album's title to
Shakespeare's The Tempest, widely regarded as his last play, and the idea that
follows is that this record is likewise some farewell, a summation of sorts, a
final rallying of waning creative energies, perhaps the closing act in Dylan's
storied career. The idea of Bob as a kind of riverboat prospero is hugely
appealing, and he remains, supremely, a story-telling sorcerer, but Dylan has
already dismissed the /comparison as simply wrong-headed and therefore
pointless. And for all its evident pre-occupation with death and the end of
things, Tempest is in many respects the most far-reaching, provocative and
transfixing album of Dylan's later career. Nothing about it suggests a swansong,
adios or fond adieu.

'I ain't dead yet, my bell still rings' he sings on 'Early Roman Kings', and how loud and bright and strong that clarion toll yet sounds.

Why sycophant? Cuz he likes a work by one of the often (not always) supreme songwriters of our time? A work you haven't even heard yet? Best to be silent, fool, cuz yer opinion's based on nothing. Let's wait until we hear it before we snidely chalkenge the review's validity or the reviewer's character and skill. Ok, boys?

After the initial explosion of fawning Columbia-driven publicity (Bob's best since blah blah blah; he's never done anything like this before), the dust has settled and it's well, okay, but badly in need of some tunes instead of the tiresome repetitive musical phrasing that plagues some of the songs. Nowhere near as good as Love and Theft; to be honest, not as good as Christmas in the Heart, which was at least fun. Probably better than Modern Times, though.